Tag: Roku

Amazon Cloud Player Updates – Matches Competitors

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Amazon MP3 LogoWe’ve had a long road in cloud music. Back in December of last year, we compared the limitations of Google Music to that of Amazon MP3. At the time, Google won. The Amazon web player was not feature filled, the Google Music interface won, for ability to enter metadata, among other things.

But that has changed. Amazon announced a new revamped cloud offering. The most significant innovation is one that iTunes already offers, and that Amazon will now as well. Amazon will scan music libraries and match the songs on their computers to their catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased elsewhere or ripped from CDs will be made instantly available in Cloud Player as 256 Kbps audio.

Cloud Player now allows editing of metadata inside the player, a feature Google has had for some time.

Amazon Cloud Player is expanding to the Roku Box.

And, unlike previously, music purchased prior to the announcement of Amazon Cloud Player will now be available in your box. This was always a pet peeve, as Amazon knew the music was purchased…you bought it from them.

The new Cloud Player offers two options.

  • Cloud Player Free – Store all music purchased from Amazon, plus 250 songs.
  • Cloud Player Premium – Store up to 250,000 songs for $25 a year.

Amazon Cloud Player is now separate from Amazon Cloud Drive. Drive will now be used exclusively for file storage. 5GB is offered free, and 20GB is available for $10 per year.

In both cases, this is a compelling offer. However, there are some things missing. No Linux client for the desktop apps for either Drive or Player. No API for third-party development, which we’ve mentioned before.

How does this compare to Google Music? Google Music, since we last visited it, sells music itself…offers limited download functionality, and still has several limitations. Amazon is looking a lot more compelling.

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Downstreaming: A Month of Netflix Streaming

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In 1998 Reed Hastings founded Netflix, the lar...
Image via Wikipedia

Netflix has been around so long that people might be surprised it took us until now to discuss it, or that we’d never tried it, and we still have yet to try their more traditional DVD by mail product.

Netflix is an obvious choice for someone looking to downsize their monthly entertainment budget. However, they are making the transition from their old business model, movies by mail, to the new one, streaming. For those who are HD purists, there are problems. Back in October, users were complaining that despite the premium for a blu-ray subscription, Netflix wasn’t acquiring catalog titles in blu-ray, and was generally neglecting that aspect of their business.

So, that said, let’s focus on the streaming. They offer an unlimited streaming plan for $7.99 a month. Netflix does offer HD streaming on some titles, but it is a limited subset of their overall catalog, and it is not yet perfect, by any means.  Overall, watching SD content, we found it of acceptable quality. The big issue is selection.

Netflix is aggressively negotiating deals with content providers to get their content on its service. However, in looking at the most current popular TV shows, Netflix tends to offer older episodes, and not as large a selection, and is significantly behind Hulu on overall popular TV content offerings. If you want classic TV and related offers, Netflix offers a great overall selection. In popular movies of 2010, Netflix is offering only about ten percent. But this is a problem for streaming overall.

To be honest, if it was a matter of content, there is enough on Netflix streaming to give us many many hours of entertainment. In that regard, it is a great service. We can sit around and catch up on older content we missed, as well as dozens of movies. To make this point, let’s look at instantwatcher, a third-party Netflix watching site. At the time of this writing, the most popular movie being watched was Get Shorty, circa 1995, which had just become available to streaming two days earlier. There were a few breakout hits from the last few years in the list, such as Shutter Island, as well, but again, this is where streaming is lacking. The selection is slowly improving as Netflix makes new deals.

So, never having a problem finding something to watch, if not always a currently popular item, means Netflix will keep you entertained. And its recommendation engine is relatively good, after it gets to know you, at making suggestions.

As a positive push, the company has ensured the ubiquity of Netflix streaming on devices. If you have a Windows or Mac machine, you can stream to your computer. Much to many people’s annoyances, it is not offered on Linux. The majority of network-enabled TVs and blu-ray players now embed Netflix streaming, as does the AppleTV, WD TV Live, and of course, the Roku Video Player, which started life as the Roku Netflix Box. A variety of game consoles, such as the Wii, PS3, and XBox also support Netflix.

We used the Roku box, as the least expensive and tiny piece of hardware, to do our testing, but clearly Netflix streaming support is now a core feature everywhere, to the point that Netflix has successfully arranged for a Netflix button to appear on many devices that have the service built in.

Should you get Netflix? We’d say yes, with a caveat. If you are putting in a Netflix plan to your overall budget and, as a result, justify a reduction in your cable service level, then it is certainly worth it. But, by itself, it is not a complete solution. More on that to come.

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Downstreaming: The Roku Box

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Netflix Roku Box - III
Image by vscarpenter via Flickr

Last week, Roku announced they served their one billionth stream of content after announcing they’d sold one million units. We first started talking about the Roku box two years ago when it was for Netflix only. Since then, Roku has unveiled countless channels…some good, some useless…well, to us at least.

Also, the base price for a Roku box has gone down to $59.99, and now offers Hulu Plus, Amazon Video on Demand, Pandora, MLB.Tv, NFL Gamecenter, NBA Gametime, Radiotime, etc.

Roku’s current offering is three boxes: The Roku HD, XD, and XDS. The latter two offer the options of 1080p and Wireless-N. The XDS offers a USB port and component video and optical outputs(which were built in on the original Roku). We did read of multiple complaints with Roku customer service, but never had a problem with the device worth calling about, nor has anyone else we know personally, so we cannot confirm this. We read through a lot of reviews about overseas technical support and TV connection quality, but have been unable to reproduce it.

It has a thriving community of enthusiasts and many private extra channels beyond what Roku provides…and they grow their list regularly. Even without paying for some of the subscription channels, there are hours of content to entertain, organized in a simple interface The issue with the internet is that content is everywhere…organizing it is the hard thing.

The truth is this…a HTPC will do a lot more. But it is an HTPC. The Roku is a tiny box that is basically plug and play. Even if you have an HTPC, you may not have it in every room. For us, using Linux for our DVR, services like Netflix are unavailable to us. This fills in those gaps. It also lacks a large amount of HD content, but this is more a provider issue. Full HD content online is in its infancy.

Basically, if you want a simple device that puts a lot of content in on place with very little setup required, that is not much larger than two decks of playing cards, this is the device for you. If you want something more complex…we’ll get to that in future editions.

Update: Roku has refreshed its offerings . We’ve updated the below links accordingly.

[asa_collection]Roku Collection[/asa_collection]

 

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Downstreaming: Amazon Video on Demand

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Amazon VOD on Roku
Image by programwitch via Flickr

For the first installment of Downstreaming, we’re going to explore Amazon Video On Demand as an option for acquiring content.

Amazon Video on Demand, formerly known as Amazon Unbox, is Amazon’s video streaming service. It is not subscription based. It is an ala-carte video service that offers both rental and purchase. You can also purchase passes to TV shows and receive a discount.

Amazon VOD support is built into the Roku Box, Google TV, Tivo, and select televisions and blu-ray players. You can also stream it using Adobe Flash on a computer. It offers both SD and HD rentals. We’re just waiting for an HTML5 version, and iOS and Android apps for the mobile platforms.

We decided to give it a shot, taking advantage of an offer for the popular movie Inception for 99 cents for a 48 hour rental. It included a $4 credit if we choose to buy the movie afterward. Video acceleration on the Linux version of  Adobe Flash can sometimes lag a bit, so we used a Roku Box to test the service. The movie playback was great, and there is a good selection of daily/weekly/monthly deals and some free content.

One of the nicest value added additions Amazon VOD offers is Disc+ On Demand. This is an Amazon program for those who purchase physical media. On select discs, you will automatically get a digital version of your purchased movie in your Amazon Video on Demand library. The problem is, so far, in movies we’ve bought, this is a limited time rental. We think many people would pay extra for a movie, or a premium to get disc plus digital copy provided by Amazon VOD.

Many movies are now being bundled with a digital copy that is time limited. An Amazon VOD redemption option with each movie seems like a better idea for studios, even if it is only a discount on getting the streaming copy. Teleread, for example, recently commented on how the code to use the digital copy included with the latest Star Trek movie expired…before they had purchased the movie. Yet the discs are still being bundled. The issue with buying content…excuse us…licensing content that is stored in the cloud is if the service provider ceases to provide the service. Then…what do you own?

Amazon VOD, in their terms of service, states, “Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions and for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.” We would feel more comfortable if, like their Kindle scandal a while back, Amazon was forced to ensure that even if they can no longer sell an item, that anyone who purchased it is still entitled to enjoy it in perpetuity, as the term “Buy” implies. But, for rentals, the service is a good alternative.

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Roku Releases Ten New Content Channels for Video Player

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Roku Netflix Player Size Comparison
Image by yonnage via Flickr

We love the idea of the Roku Video Player, formerly the Roku Netflix Player. We’ve been talking about it from early on, and have used one, although we admit to not owning one(not yet, at least).

Today, Roku started releasing a major update for the box. It includes ten new content channels:  Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe.

Now, there are some disappointments there. These are good sites, but nothing show stopping, like Hulu, or even Youtube. And the fact they haven’t incorporated streaming from your own home computer is equally disappointing.

The Roku Channel Store, the platform under which these new channels were launched, hopes to become a platform for future development. We’d love to see that.

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Roku Video Player to Add Revision3

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The Roku Video Player(formerly Roku Netflix Player) will soon be adding the popular and free Revision 3 line of shows to its devices.
Currently, the player supports Netflix Streaming, Amazon Video-On-Demand, and MLB.TV, all subscription or pay-per-view services. The Revision3 functionality will be the first free service for the inexpensive little box that could.

The Revision 3 stable of shows, with their newest as an exception, are all non-fiction shows, geared at various interest groups, and will be offered in HD-quality(or as high as your connection supports).

Updated with links to latest Roku boxes.

[asa_collection]Roku Collection[/asa_collection]

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The Latest on Hulu and Netflix

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Time to catch up on the latest from these two services.

  • Playboy seems to think Hulu is coming to the Roku Video Player. That would certainly please us. But Roku, the creator of the player, has insisted they have not made any public statements regarding Hulu and they don’t know where Playboy gets their information. Roku currently supports Amazon Video on Demand and Netflix, and promised as many as ten new channels by the end of the year but has not yet delivered.
  • Netflix appears to not recognize Puerto Rico as part of the United States and is blocking the territory’s use of its Watch Instantly feature, something Hulu once did. It explicitly excludes anything outside of the fifty states and the District of Columbia.
  • Hulu has added its own application for playing outside of a browser which works on Windows and Mac(but not Linux). In a ‘nod’ to Boxee, certainly a more developed product, the new product originally advised you to kill Boxee on Macs to avoid conflicts. This has since been changed. Hulu’s Terms of Service state that: “You may not download, install or use the Hulu Software on any device other than a Personal Computer including without limitation digital media receiver devices (such as Apple TV), mobile devices (such as a cell phone device, mobile handheld device or a PDA), network devices or CE devices (collectively “Prohibited Devices”).” It does not prohibit hooking a computer to a TV, but it seems to suggest this is the thing Hulu is trying to forbid, which does not bode well for them.
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Roku Update

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Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
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Yesterday, we wrote both on Roku Netflix Player, and on Amazon Video on Demand. EngadgetHD reports today that Amazon Video on Demand will be available on the box after a free software update early this year. Any of Amazon’s 40,000 other titles will be able to be purchased and played back to the TV for a 24 hour window. Unfortunately, the maximum bitrate is only h.264 compressed 1200Kbps. No HD as yet.

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TV Alternatives – Roku Player

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WASHINGTON, DC - DECEMBER 18: Actor Morgan Fr...
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This topic continues to weigh on our minds. We’re convinced that as cable/satellite prices continue to rise, and as these companies insist on shutting down analog, it will be impossible for us to continue as we have, which is why we continue to prepare for an eventual paradigm shift.

Where we live, our cable provider, who has a monopoly in our neighborhood, has shut off analog service, encrypted most things we could get with a digital tuner, and been generally uncooperative. As of now, with some threats and cajoles, it is still cost effective to have cable.

Meanwhile, we have relatives whom we visit for holidays and weekends. The cable company there has not yet dropped analog cable there, and offers the standard cable package unencrypted. One TV has a digital box, and the rest use built in tuners. We’re certain that they will eventually drop analog, and for a house that swells during a holiday/weekend from only needing a bedroom and living room television to a house with all bedrooms filled with people with different television watching habits, it isn’t cost effective to rent one $10(which is what they charge), per TV.

Worse, unlike our urban residence, this more rural setting gets no broadcast transmissions, making cable or satellite the only television option. Fortunately though, it makes for the perfect testbed for our exploration. It is winter here, and our visits become less frequent, but we intend to be prepared for spring.

We’re very interested in the Roku Netflix Player, which late last month introduced a firmware update to allow it to stream Netflix‘s HD content. Since this device is portable, it could be brought into any room and movies streamed directly to it. When the item came out, the New York Times blogged about its thoughts on the future. We have our thoughts with theirs, below:

  • The price point of this device is $99. Keeping the price point this low allows for widespread adoption
  • It doesn’t require an always-on server at the owner’s house to work…although we wouldn’t complain if it doubled as a uPnP/DLNA server so it could stream from a local system if we wanted it to.
  • The device is capable, through firmware updates, of adding new content from other sources than Netflix, and Roku has promised such change in the new year, which may make this device sell out, as we’re not going to buy one until we know what other content is coming. The device supports flash and other formats, so the frontrunner may be Hulu, which would be a gem if offered directly to one’s television.
  • Rather than requiring you to sort through the 10,000+ offerings, you can narrow it down on your computer, and select from a reduced subset.
  • Third-party plugins – Roku is offering a free software development kit to any online video content provider who wishes to add a channel of content alongside the Netflix content. Aside from the channels Roku has been promising, this would allow a third party to take control of their plugin to ensure it met their standards. On the open source side of things, we’re hoping that the developers of several open source media projects find a way to stream to the device. After all, while it is designed to be independent of a computer, that doesn’t mean it could not optionally offer content that is dependent as well. Of course, this goes back at its simplest to the uPnP support idea.

If this device was extended to uPnP, we’d set up an old computer to serve media files and buy a box for several televisions. A $99 flat rate is better than a $10 a month rental rate.

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